On Thu, 9 Aug 2001, Faheem Mitha wrote: > This is possibly offtopic, but can someone explain to me what a > framebuffer is, and why one should care about it? I have seen it
It's the area of RAM on the video card that holds the actual image being displayed. The framebuffer device is the interface to this video RAM through the kernel. Essentially it allows you to draw graphics on the screen. Although I haven't been keeping up with development, at one point the idea was that there would be a generic X-server that would use the kernel framebuffer access, so you wouldn't have to have a bunch of different X servers for all the different types of video cards. But this isn't very efficient for accelerated functions and it won't do for OpenGL at all. So I don't really know where they are going with it now :}
